The development of international agreements to regulate, restrict, and ban various weapons of war is a counterintuitive aspect of world politics: why do states agree to limit the tools they use for their defense and security? Even more puzzling, many of these agreements have been led not by great powers, but by smaller states—countries that most accounts of international relations dismiss as relatively ineffective and insignificant. Yet in a world where great powers have turned inward from global governance and arms control, understanding smaller states' efforts to regulate the tools of war becomes especially important. Smaller states' efforts in multilateral weapons governance have produced a variety of different treaties, from absolute prohibitions on antipersonnel landmines to limited regulations on incendiary weapons that still permit their use in many circumstances, to restrictions that prohibit nuclear weapons for some states while allowing them for others. Some agreements have closely reflected the ideas of the smaller states leading the initiative, while others have been significantly altered. What explains these differences across agreements?

Weapons Governance by the Weak examines how smaller states develop multilateral agreements to govern weapons. It shows how, in pursuing new weapons governance treaties, smaller states face a critical decision regarding how much to compromise with great powers. This choice, combined with the extent to which great powers support or oppose the initiative, accounts for what kind of agreement smaller states' efforts produce. The strategic interactions between smaller states and great powers explains the variation across multilateral weapons governance treaties, which ranges from great power cooptation to weak agreements to normative pressure to oppositional prohibitions. The book demonstrates how the choices made in these strategic interactions lead to different kinds of governance, using comparative case studies of the 1968 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, the 1980 Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons, the 1997 Mine Ban Treaty, and the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

In a time in which many scholars, analysts, and policymakers proclaim the death of arms control, Weapons Governance by the Weak demonstrates how smaller states have pursued weapons governance through different pathways, for different purposes, and with different outcomes than a focus on great powers alone has concluded. In this context, understanding how smaller states have developed such agreements—and why their efforts have produced mixed results—enables scholars and policymakers to chart a path forward in evaluating prospects for contemporary and future governance.